Putting a name to the flames

Already this year, the Ute Park and the Spring Creek fires have become synonymous with ashen skies and widespread destruction.

But hidden in their names is a clue about each: their place of origin. Unlike hurricanes, wildfires are not named from a predetermined list. They are named by officials, who choose names based on “a geographical location, local landmark, street, lake, mountain, peak, etc.,” the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said.

Officials said that quickly coming up with a label provides firefighters another way to locate the blaze and allows officials to track and prioritize incidents by name. A Twitter hashtag that identified the devastating fires in San Diego in 2007 — #sandiegofire — proved useful as people used it to organize information about road closures and evacuations, officials said.

In most cases, the dispatch centre sending the initial resources to a wildfire gets to name it, but sometimes that task falls to the first fire person- nel on the scene, officials said.

“You could have a fire by a landfill — and they might call it the Dump Fire,” Heather Williams, a Cal Fire spokesperson said. “Sometimes the names come through and it’s like, ‘Really guys?’ ”

She conceded that the more remote the area, the harder it is to come up with a good name. Fires sparked by lightning, in particular, can pose a challenge, she said. In those cases, officials may simply use the co-ordinates on a map grid to name a fire something like “R-15.”

Most of those peculiar names, though, go under the radar.

During the summer of 2015, there were so many fires, officials named one in southeast Idaho “Not Creative,” according to reports. An Idaho Department of Lands spokesperson told NPR the name was selected after a long day of firefighting and after officials realized there were no significant landmarks nearby.